Monday, January 30, 2012

Pardon the silence; I’ve
been sojourning in the land of the academic job market.

I want to think today, quite
bluntly, about political subjectivation. How is it that in the punctum of our
present a political subject has emerged? Why Occupy? And what do I even mean by
political subject, by the political itself? Gestures toward “the political”
saturate my own discourse, and, thus far I’ve refused to define the term except
indirectly: it’s something lost, something irreducible to regimes of
calculability, and so on. But it remains
a vague term. Those of us who live anti-liberalism religiously tend to invoke
the political as a blank, critical resource. Given that the political is that
against which liberalism defines itself, that which liberalism seeks to limit,
contain, and expel, we inflate the signifier as signifier, as if “the
political” has a transcendent signified utterly exorbitant to linguistic
capture. It has no such signified, and we kind of know this, and when we’re
pressed to contort the exorbitant(ly empty) term into a communicable form we
typically stutter out some Schmittian line. Here, I don’t want to define “the
political”; rather, I want to think of the political itself as the process by
which signifiers, on one hand, point beyond themselves to a transcendent
exorbitancy and, on the other hand, point to nothing in the world. Let’s say
that the political is ex-orbitant: it names a world saturated with transcendent
meaning even as it marks an emptying-out, a cancellation, an active ex-ing of the orbis. In this double-play of the ex-orbitant we can locate the
emergence of the political subject called Occupy.

The political isn’t
identical to a scale, institution, or form; rather, the political is what
advenes in the de-structuring of a worldly ordinary. It comes to pass in the
conditions of absolute undecidability, when the nomos of the given world is
cancelled. I use the passive voice [“is cancelled”] because I want to leave the
agency of cancellation unmarked, just as I want to leave the structuring nomos
unmarked. This cancellation, I want to suggest, actually produces the nomos it
cancels as a self-conscious entity; it subjectivates it. (The “Keynesian state”
becomes subjectivated after its wholesale destruction, and is subjectivated as
a critique of neoliberalism, for instance.) The political takes place in the
withdrawal of a world that only appears as a world in its withdrawal, when the ex produces the orbis it cancels. The political, then, couldn’t be a scale or form
of activity—it takes place in the break, between regimes, as an interregnum
where undecidability is the norm. Nor could it be an agential subject,
something that an intending actor does, for subjectivation happens as an effect
of structural cancellation, as the subjectivation of a lost world, a lost
ordinary. The political subject is called into being by a lost world, a cancellation
of a structure that becomes legible only through its cancellation. The ancien regime
appears as a political subject only through revolutionary fighting in the
streets.

The political subject is a
structure of intentionality that survives the loss of the world that made that
mode of being-toward-the-world an unexceptional aspect of being-in-the-world. It
emerges in the cruelty of a desire or demand that won’t quit despite the
structural impossibility of its realization—a demand for a state that cares,
for instance, that is not set to work merely to facilitate the valorization of
capital. The political begins when we’ve lost our grip on reality, when our
worldly ordinary vanishes and, vanishing, seems to have been real, when we're forced to decide on new approaches to the real. The inaugural
tonality of the political is thus one of frustration, of disorientation. This
frustration, I want to suggest, is not primarily a frustration with the given
world, but a frustration with one’s inability to unlearn the protocols of
intentionality that produce this frustration—a frustration not with the world
in which one is but a frustration with one’s being-toward-the-world that could
only produce frustration. Conservative political subjectivity refuses to let go
of this frustration; it wishes for the world to re-conform to its worldless
structure of intentionality. This dynamic explains how both conservative and radical political subjectivity can
be denigrated as romantic, as utopian—each prioritizes a structure of
intentionality over an epistemically valid description of the world as such.

But the radical political
subject relates to intentionality differently. If the political emerges in the
mismatch between a structure of intentionality and the given world, radical political
subjectivity enacts itself by unlearning the intentionality that binds subjects
to a lost world, by destroying the phenomenological structure that makes the
subject optimistically invest again and again in a world that has abandoned the
worldly structures that might have made this investment worthwhile. The radical
political subject is not one who decides, simply, on a new world but one who,
in all its fractured plurality, co-decides on a new being-toward-the-world.

Occupy is now, finally,
radicalizing, becoming a radical political subject. (There were always radicals
a part of Occupy, those for whom the world of capital held no promise. My point
is that the radical is becoming the set that incorporates the reformist [and
Ron Paulite] elements.) Oakland
is in the lead here, and their example is contagious, spreading in the form of
small acts. Occupy Philly’s march through Center City last night—tying up
traffic, confusing police, generating a carnival atmosphere in which people in
cars honked out tunes in time with our chants—ended with some tearing down the
fence around a privatized Dilworth Plaza, tearing down the stupid Dilworth
project banners that surround the site to tell the public that privatization is
just fucking awesome. We’re getting angry, we’re learning from our own
frustration, we’re cultivating our hatred for capitalism, we’re starting to
work on our own structure of desire to come to a point where we can begin to
co-decide on new modes of being-toward-the-world. Occupy is now undertaking the
revolutionary labor of ex-ing the orbis by unlearning the epistemic programming
that makes subjects invest in a world that is always already lost. Reformists
will drop out. Bye!

Will the world follow our
intentions? Who knows. The co-decision on a new being-toward-the-world is
necessarily exorbitant to the world that is—there is nothing that guarantees
that the world will bear the burden of the novel intentionality we will decide
upon. We don’t necessarily know what a new world will look like, and we couldn’t:
the exorbitant will remain undecidable, and we’re leaning how to dwell in this
undecidability, how to occupy the space of the incalculable. For now, we’re
content to frighten power by our radical refusal to be frustrated by a world
that has abandoned its promises. We’re already desiring other worlds. We're already political.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

“For let us consider how
many, both of the living and the dead, could be made to animate us.” So writes
Thomas Clarkson in chapter eleven of The
History of the Rise, Progress, & Accomplishment of the Abolition of the
African Slave-trade (1808), the chapter in which Clarkson explains his famous riverine “map” that traces the confluences of antislavery sentiment that
led, in part, to the abolition of the trade in 1807. Clarkson’s graphical depiction
of the rhizomatic communication of influence functions as an interesting counterpoint
to the rather linear narrative given theretofore. Through the image, we see
that political animation—the kind that Clarkson described above—is never
linear, obvious; it snakes around, twists about, drawing even on the life of
the dead for its motive force. Looking back over the image as I re-read
Clarkson’s masterpiece, I was struck by how it approximates one mapping of OWSTwitter networks I had seen two months ago. This similitude prompted a
question: How could the social movement propelled by Clarkson’s labors “be made
to animate us”? What lessons does Clarkson hold for us?

Admittedly, Clarkson is
probably not the literary bread-and-butter of Occupy. Occupiers are more likely
to read Marcuse, for instance, or other 20th century
quasi-/post-/neo-Marxists, than they are to settle down with a history of a
reformist movement composed in 1808. Particularly on college campuses, it is
perhaps through an intellectual engagement with the questions of class and
exploitation posed by these theorists that students come to desire an
involvement with a movement like Occupy. Here, theory quickens and animates, transforming
intellectuals thinking about the world into intellectuals attempting to change
it. For many Occupiers I know, theory isn’t merely theory: even if theoretical
engagement began as a merely scholastic exercise, it became a call to action.
And this is the first lesson we can take from Clarkson. In a biographical
section of his history, he describes how he came to awareness of the
slave-trade. Students at Cambridge
competitively submitted dissertations in the hopes of securing a university
prize. Young Thomas had won such a prize the year before, and desired the fame of
winning first prize again. The prompt for the prize was simple: “Anne liceat Invitos
in Servitutem dare? or, Is it right to make slaves of other against their will?”
Clarkson eagerly anticipated both the intellectual enjoyments of crafting a
fine Latin essay and the honors that such a fine essay would bring. Like a good
grad student, he began to diligently research slavery, focusing on the
present-day slave-trade. He began to write, but the pleasures he had
anticipated were “damped by the facts which were now continually before me. It
was but one gloomy subject from morning to night…It became now not so much a
trial for academical reputation, as for the production of a work, which might
be useful to injured Africa.” A fight for academic prestige, the flexing of
rhetorical and analytic muscles…these served to bring Clarkson into ethical,
and then organizational, contact with British antislavery.

Lesson one, then: we don’t
get to choose the manner of our activist animation, we don’t get to choose how
a politico-ethical demand appears within the bland contexts of our everyday
worlds. We might begin as silly students, reading Heidegger and Nancy late at
night to catch up with our peers in the battle for prestige, but we don’t know,
we can’t know, how these texts might serve as so many tributaries sending us,
gently at first, to a broader social movement. Nor do we get to choose the
manner in which we comport ourselves once we’ve made contact with the animated
world of activism; we don’t get to choose, I mean, what the practice of
activism looks like. Sure, antislavery historians or Hollywood movies will direct us to the spectacular scenes of popular mobilization—loud
speeches, louder crowds, and all topped off with petitions, written on
streaming rolls of paper, unraveled before Parliament. But anyone involved with
Occupy knows that much of the work of Occupy takes place in front of a
computer, navigating cluttered inboxes, making sense of lengthy email chains, reading
and writing endless responses. Clarkson had a similar experience. Supposed to
send his comrade a “weekly account” of his progress in stirring up initial
support, Clarkson describes the textual bloat: “At the end of the first week my
letter to him contained little more than a sheet of paper. At the end of the
second it contained three; at the end of the third six; and at the end of the
fourth I found it would be so voluminous, that I was obliged to decline writing
it.” But the reading and writing didn’t stop. Clarkson describes daily sessions
that stretched from 9pm
until 3am where he and his colleagues examined custom-house
receipts until their “eyes were enflamed by the candle.” And Clarkson’s History is itself an artifact of the
humdrum textuality of revolutionary activism.

If lesson two is that
revolutionary activism entails decidedly nonrevolutionary, unsexy, and (let’s
say it) boring activity, the third lesson we can take from Clarkson is the importance
of not letting our revolutionary aims be trumped by the feeling of quotidian
normality that even revolutionary activity assumes. In a beautiful passage,
Clarkson describes how, eyes enflamed, “tired by fatigue,” he and his comrade
would “relieve ourselves by walking out within the precincts of Lincoln’s Inn,
when all seemed to be fast asleep, and thus, as it were, in solitude and in
stillness to converse upon them, as well as the best means of the further
promotion of our cause…Having recruited ourselves in this manner, we used to
return to our work.” Dreaming dreams in the solitude of night. But we also get
a lesson, shortly thereafter, about the possible consequences of failing to
dream well enough, to dream deeply enough. Clarkson and company are in a
meeting, one of the first of their formally organized society, and someone
poses the question: Do we oppose merely the slave-trade, or slavery as an
institution? The conveyance of slaves or the very mode of labor? You probably
know how the debate goes: Given that plantation slavery relied on fresh imports
due to staggering death-rates, and given that Parliament definitely had the
sovereign power to regulate commerce but did not have uncontested sovereignty
over the internal affairs of colonies with representative assemblies, and given
that property rights—even in people—should remain inviolate, the society
decided to focus on the slave-trade, leaving slavery a fact of the British
world for decades more. It’s tragic reasoning, a failure of imagination, a
reformist approach to the real. An anti-lesson.

If
we let Clarkson animate us, we’ll derive three lessons: We don’t choose what
propels us to act; revolutionary action is less a punctual moment of affective
intensity than a humdrum labor that takes time; and, despite the routine and
routinized work of revolution, we need to keep our revolutionary dreams alive. Let’s
add one more: Clarkson’s work—his history, his activism—demonstrate that
another world is indeed possible. For thousands of years, slavery, commerce in
people, was simply a fact. Without making too big a claim for Anglo-Atlantic
exceptionalism, we need to take seriously the fact that the zone of formal freedom
that Clarkson helped carve into being was minimal compared to the zones where
human “enslaveability,” to use Drescher’s term, would continue to condition
human life. Antislavery beat the odds, beat the weight of history, and made
opposition to slavery, and thus formal freedom, a ground-level assumption about
human being in the world. There were and are limits to the value of this formal
freedom, as any post-emancipation society shows. But taking this long
historical view, we might see ourselves as the newest tributaries on Clarkson’s
riverine map—we might see ourselves as people struggling to achieve substantial
freedom in a world where formal, merely formal, freedom is the norm.

Monday, January 2, 2012

A new year, a planetary
revolution completed: a good time to consider the hermeneutics of novelty, of
revolution. If such a hermeneutics could exist, and nothing is less certain.
For, certainly, liberal capitalism has functioned through the banalization of
the new. We could think of myriad media technologies (the newspaper, the novel,
a 24-hour news-cycle), consumption habits (“fashion” being the most obvious
habit of practicing novelty), and technologies of governmentality as mechanisms
that contain the new by proliferating novelties, inventions, deviations. The
problem facing a hermeneutics of revolutionary novelty is this: How to read the
appearance of the new in such a way that it is not (dis)figured by liberal
capitalism’s deep embrace of novelty? We are, after all, conscripted
imaginatively into liberalism: How are we to unthink the cognitive frameworks
that enable thought at all?

Marx articulates the problem
neatly in a famous passage. On one hand, “The social revolution of the
nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the
future.” For Marx, earlier revolutions suffered from a failure of imagination;
they could not read the poetry to come, the poetry of the future: “Earlier
revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug
themselves concerning their own content.” Marx resolves the problem with a
normative claim—one that, humorously, “require[s]” a Christological messianism
for it to make sense: “In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of
the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” (For readers without
the dubious benefit of 12 years of Catholic education, “let the dead bury the
dead” is an utterance of Jesus, Matthew 8:22.) That is, the revolution must
move beyond the poetry of the past, the “required recollections,” and live
dangerously open to a future-oriented present. Indeed, it must speak the future
in the present as if it were already the future (“draw[ing] its poetry…only
from the future”). But what would this poetry sound like, look like? Marx makes
this poetry thinkable by comparing it, formally and semantically, to the
past-oriented poetry of earlier revolutions: “There [in the past] the phrase
went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.” It’s not
that the phrase says more than it means—rather, the phrase cannot say what it
means. We don’t have the language yet, but the intuition of this content, this
poetry of the future that lacks a language, has already beggared the words, the
phrases that we do possess. The future that affects language does so by
loosening its hold on the future, insofar as the future (the content) goes
beyond the phrase.

Language has nothing to say
about the future.

With brutal honesty, Marx
submits his own work to the double bind he diagnoses. The future cannot be
said, its content is exorbitant to its phrasing. Yet one writes. And, indeed,
writes with phrases derived from “recollections of past world history” (e.g., “let
the dead bury the dead”). One could read Marx’s entire corpus as a negotiation
with this double bind: How to write the new, to develop a hermeneutic for
reading novelty, knowing that one only possesses the poetry of the past—that
one is “required,” cognitively, to read the future in the determinate figures
generated by the past? Capital is little more than the generalization of this
requirement, as if, one day, everyday, capitalism reads a kind of requerimiento
to those whose imaginations it would colonize. We can see Marx playing with
this fact at multiple points: the subordination of variable capital to constant
capital discussed in volume 1 has its cultural-linguistic counterpart in Marx’s
claim that “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare
on the brain of the living.” Value—as both a body of theoretical ruminations on value from Petty to Smith to Ricardo to Mill and as the value-form itself—similarly performs this
operation of fashioning the new in a determinate image. All that remains for
the revolutionary is this blank sign, the “future,” the “new,” which intimates
a “content” that exceeds its phrasing. But one cannot speak the new as new, in
new terms, in new words, because we lack the language, because we’re required,
as conscripts of capital, to speak in such and such a way. But, at the same
time, one cannot not speak: the future is the only thing worth speaking about,
even if one cannot speak it.

The point is this: we lack a
cognitive structure to perceive the new, because the new renders the cognitive
structures that we do possess indeterminate. We might not know it when it hits
us. But we might symptomatize it. As I re-read Marx’s sentence about phrasing
revolution (“…here the content goes beyond the phrase”), I’m struck by how this
seems to mimic a kind of stutter. A meaning-to-say that stumbles on the
materiality of language, a content that can’t quite—but not for lack of trying—articulate
itself. It’s at this point, where language can’t fully grasp the object or
process it tries taking in hand, that some kind of newness is being illumined.
The future appears, first and foremost, in moments where the epistemological
authority of the past and present is evacuated. Not as a destruction, but as an
indetermination—one that exposes the poetry of the past to the possibility of a
poetry of the future. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stutter—that is,
one must perform that inability of language to speak the force that affects
one, that brings one to speech.

I want to think of Occupy as
a series of revolutionary stutters, a movement that has brought one language
(that of neoliberalism in the U.S.) to crisis while, simultaneously, seeking a
language to describe the future it would inaugurate. We need to hold onto this
stuttering revolutionary speech. (That, at least, is what I’ve been trying to
do: to see how the slogans and practices of Occupy are potentiated by a “content”
exorbitant to their “phras[ing],” a content that fleetingly appears in the
articulation of such phrases.) We need to do so because the moment that Occupy’s
stuttering indeterminacy becomes easily articulated speech, we will have lost
the future, Occupy will have become a reform movement, and we will be left
speaking the language of the present. We need to see in our stuttering
critiques and programs that force of a future to come, to, indeed, become
comfortable with the fact that we don’t have a language for what we want.